The Gendered Unconscious

Can Gender Discourses Subvert Psychoanalysis?

Louise Gyler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415401708
• eBook ISBN: 9781134144303
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Feminist interventions in psychoanalysis have often attempted either to subvert or re-frame the masculinist and phallocentric biases of Freud's psychoanalysis. This book investigates the nature of these interventions by comparing the status and treatment of women in two different psychoanalytic models: the Kleinian and the feminist models. It argues that, in fact, these interventions have historically tended to reinforce such biases by collapsing the distinction between the gendered minds of individuals and theories of gender.

This investigation is framed by two steps. First, in assessing the position of women and the feminine in psychoanalysis, The Gendered Unconscious explores not only the ways they are represented in theory, but also how these representations function in practice. Secondly, this book uses a framework of a comparative dialogue to highlight the assumptions and values that underpin the theory and clinical practice in the two psychoanalytic models. This comparative critique concludes with the counter-intuitive claim that contemporary Kleinian theory may, in practice, hold more radical possibilities for the interests of women than the practices derived from contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory.

This book is of significant interest to those studying the psychology of women, psychoanalytic studies, health psychology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to clinicians and candidates of professional psychotherapy and psychoanalytic training programmes.

1
INTRODUCTION

The sex question, psychoanalysis and feminism

After all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.

(Freud, 1926a, p. 212)

Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity.

(Freud, 1933, p. 113)

Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

(Butler, 1990, p. 7)

The metaphors of the “dark continent”, “the riddle” and “gender trouble” introduce anxious, uncertain and productive moments for psychoanalysis. They also carry defining points of tension in the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. Since the inception of Freud’s phallocentric account of psychosexuality, controversy over the question of female sexuality has continued. On the one hand, Freud radically proposes that there is an unstable loose relationship between the libidinal drive and its aim and object. On the other, the unsatisfactory symbolic equation— active-masculine-male and conversely, passive-feminine-female—with which Freud ambivalently struggled, has a long representational history in Western thought. This equation generates our ideas about gender (L.Segal, 1997) as well as reflects the social and historical dominance of men and the masculine.

In this book, it is the values and assumptions about the ways that gender and sexuality function in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that is my central concern. My focus is on the discourses of gender and their implications for knowledge construction. I argue that the socially normative gendered positions are woven unconsciously and consciously into our conceptual frameworks and the manner in which we practice. In my investigation, I use psychoanalytic theories, including theories of psychosexuality, along with contemporary psychoanalytic gender theories both as critical tools to deconstruct the gender hierarchy and as tools to critique each discipline’s inevitable blind spots and biases. My interest is not primarily centred on understanding sexual desire or excitement or on theories of gender development per se, but rather on psychoanalytic gender and sexual discourses. I am concerned with the gendered unconscious of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic gendered discourses rather than the unconscious sexual and gendered mind of patients, although, as we will see, these are linked. The workings of the gendered unconscious of psychoanalysis can lead to socially normative gender prescriptions going unnoticed and unanalyzed. As clinicians, I argue that it is crucial that we understand as best as possible the inevitable gender biases that constrain our work. At the same time, I suggest that while there is no possibility of transcending the gender binary, we do need to be aware of it. We are never “just clinicians”, functioning in an epistemological neutral space.

Although women were at the centre of Freud’s evolving psychoanalytic theories and practice, his relationships with women as patients and as the subject/object of his theories remain both profoundly interesting and seriously flawed. The diminished representations of women and the feminine in Freud’s writing reverberate throughout the history of psychoanalysis and have had far-reaching consequences for the ways we understand health and psychopathology. But Juliet Mitchell’s controversial claim (1974) that Freud was describing female subjectivity in a patriarchal society, rather than prescribing how women should be, opened up a new debate about the status of the Freudian devalued representations of women. Thirty years later, Irene Matthis (2004) restates the continued need to distinguish between theory concerning “who we are supposed to be” and the lived experience of who we are. In psychoanalysis, the clinical/descriptive accounts of lived subjectivity and theories of development and causation can become blurred and/or conflated (see Auchincloss and Vaughan, 2001). One of the aims of this book is to highlight the confusion between these different levels of construction, that is, between psychoanalytic theorizing and the analysand’s (patient’s) free associative descriptions of their lived experience. I will suggest that they need to be disentangled in our thinking, or, putting it more realistically, that we need to be at least aware of the inevitable conceptual difficulties around this issue and keep in mind the conflation between the gendered minds of patients (shaped in specific socio-cultural contexts and expressed in the “here and now” clinical encounter) and psychoanalytic (normative) developmental theory.

Juliet Mitchell (2002) argues that a conservative force linked to sexuality is embedded in the shared origins of both psychoanalysis and feminism. If Mitchell’s claim is valid, or can be afforded a qualified validity, then what are the implications for attempts within psychoanalytic feminism to develop progressive clinical practices? I am asking whether contemporary gender discourses can subvert psychoanalytic practices. To make inroads in destabilizing psychoanalytic models for the interests of women, we need our models to do at least two things: first, to be self-reflexive about the ways gendered discourses function; and, second, to have a capacity to translate into practice in ways that transform women’s inner experience—more specifically to manage the expression of aggression so that women can have a representational space for a sense of agency, autonomy and authority, along with connectedness, dependency and receptivity.

The starting point for this investigation is the observation that normative fictions of gender are employed by all individuals to give meaning to their subjective experience and are used to communicate this experience. We are continually saturated in this experience and this challenges our conceptual language to explicate human experience without concretizing it. I am suggesting that a slippage can occur whereby the characteristics of the normatively gendered mind of analysands and psychoanalysts can be carried concretely into theory construction in psychoanalytic thought, (re)producing explicit and implicit gendered sets of power relations. Our theorizing, thus, can sit too readily experientially close to our gendered unconscious minds. An associated issue in the (re)production of gendered discourses is the ongoing problem of generating a language for female agency—or rather a version of agency that is different from what is commonly understood as “phallic”. My thesis, then, rests on two central claims: first, all psychoanalytic theories, including feminist ones, are inevitably embedded in a gendered set of power relations that shape the way we observe, listen, think about and talk to our patients; and, second, theory and practice mutually influence each other, both reflecting and reproducing a socially normative gendered discourse.

The central tenets of psychoanalysis include an account of unconscious motivation, human emotional attachments and desire, and how these are structured and organized in the mind, as well as the ego’s capacity to split and be in opposition and conflict with itself. This last aspect of psychoanalytic thought is beautifully evoked by the iconic Freudian phrase, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” (Freud, 1917, p. 249). The Freudian conception of the unconscious, along with the inherent capacity of the ego for splitting, holds the radical potential to undercut the possibility of a rational, knowing, autonomous subject: that is, the masculinist subject of Western culture. Perhaps Freud’s greatest achievement is the development of a method for investigating the intricacies of the relation between mind and body (and their ultimate indivisibility). This clinical method is characterized by regular and frequent sessions whereby analysands are asked to comply with the fundamental rule of free associative speech, that is, the act of saying whatever comes to mind without conscious censorship (Breuer and Freud, 1893; Freud, 1913). Of central importance is the “inevitable necessity” of analyzing transference phenomena which were initially viewed by Freud as a sign of resistance but later seen as the vehicle by which “symptoms” are brought into treatment (1905a, 1912, 1915). His ideas about the fundamental rule and the centrality of the transference relationship continue to be of paramount importance to practising psychoanalysts.

Whilst both psychoanalysis and feminism are constituted by a set of gendered power relations, at the same time they both provide frameworks to critique these relations. In this investigation, I draw on their critical frameworks (and in particular their capacity to understand desire, identification and transference) to explore some of the ways that “genderedness” works in psychoanalysis. Specifically, I use a comparative dialogue between Kleinian psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalytic theories of gender to explore the ways that underlying assumptions and values concerning women, the feminine and female function both in theory and in clinical practice. I focus on the Kleinian psychoanalytic account because it highlights the importance of the relationship to the maternal body and the workings of negativity and aggression as well as its detailed attention to a theory of clinical technique, and on feminist psychoanalytic accounts of gender because they explicitly address the way representations of the feminine implicate our conception of equality and freedom.

This comparative dialogue occurs in the present-day context, where most contemporary psychoanalytic models are located within the paradigmatic shift of the “intersubjective turn,”¹ although this turn is differently formulated within the various models (Renik, 2004). In addition, all models are influenced by cross-fertilisation, leading some distinguished psychoanalysts to claim that there is a movement towards “common ground” across psychoanalytic models and that psychoanalytic pluralism is widespread (Wallerstein, 1988, 1990, 2002, 2005; Kernberg, 1993, 2001; Gabbard, 1995; White, 2001). Other psychoanalysts, notably André Green (2005), dispute the reality of these claims about a shift towards “common ground”. Notwithstanding the above debate within psychoanalysis, I think that it is possible to identify some unique and non-unique features of Kleinian and feminist inflected psychoanalytic traditions. In this investigation, a critical dialogue between the Kleinian and feminist psychoanalytic approaches is deployed to clarify their respective value commitments, explanatory frameworks and technical stances, particularly in relation to their capacity to distinguish constructions that reflect a gendered unconscious (with its implications for lived experience) from formulations that reflect a gendered theory (ideological commitments with implications for prescriptive usages).

Both Kleinian psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalytic gender theories conceptualize possibilities for increasing women’s sense of agency, freedom of thought and representation and personal happiness. Yet, I suggest that the outcome of this comparative critique is the counterintuitive claim that contemporary Kleinian theory may in practice hold more radical possibilities for the interests of women than the practices derived from contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory. Further, I contend that the feminist informed perspectives can ironically, in clinical practice, deconstruct into negating the implications of the pre-oedipal mother and supporting a too easy togetherness which creates difficulties for the development of the capacity to manage aggression, both theoretically and clinically.

Throughout this book and in keeping with the current linguistic style, I use the terms sex and gender interchangeably, but this usage has not always been the case. Gender is a relatively recent addition to our everyday lexicon. In the 1950s, the sexologist John Money (1973) made the distinction between sex and gender while investigating the gender-related behaviours of individuals with intersex conditions. Gender, here, referred to the psychological, behavioural and social variables associated with male and female identities and sex referred to the biologically based variables connected with being male or female. The term gender, not used by Freud, although implicit in his writings, is introduced to psychoanalysis by Robert Stoller (1968) through his work on gender/sexual identities. Gayle Rubin, an anthropologist (1975), and Rhoda Unger, a social scientist (1979), in their seminal contributions, instigate the use of this distinction for feminist scholars. Gender is seen as produced, context-dependent and, crucially, as fluid. In more recent years, the meanings of sex and gender, as I noted above, have become synonymous. This move does not reflect linguistic carelessness but rather the influence of postmodernist thinking, especially that of Judith Butler (1990, 2004), which sees the body as being constituted and known through culture (see discussion below). Following Freud (1905b), psychosexuality refers to the unconscious sexual (libidinal) drives, fantasy and identifications that structure sexual difference—the masculine and feminine positions. As we will see, in radical readings of the Freudian account, the question of sexual difference is not necessarily linked with socially normative gender positions. There is a debate within psychoanalysis as to whether sexuality (psychosexuality) or gender is primary and the position adopted depends on the theoretical model employed. I take the position that both psychosexuality and sex/gender are continually read through each other and through culture, constituting the socially produced “gendered unconscious mind”.

In the remainder of this chapter, I review some tensions between and some intersections of psychoanalysis and feminism that frame my investigation. I outline the developing contexts of the debates within feminism about notions of gender and sexuality; the history of the engagement between feminism and psychoanalysis; and feminist attitudes to clinical psychoanalytic practice. I then turn to clarifying the reasons for the choice of Klein and Kleinian psychoanalysis for this comparative study. This choice is not obvious, because Klein has traditionally been regarded negatively by feminism or neglected because of the heterosexist and biologistic assumptions that underpin her framework (see Chapter 2). The debates regarding the representation of femaleness and femininity are clearly at stake in the feminist attitude to Klein. These are introduced in this chapter through the use of an infant observation vignette. This vignette has a dual function as it also reveals the way problematic assumptions and values about female subjectivity are inevitably implicated in all psychoanalytic accounts. Following on from this, the nature of the relationship between theory and practice in psychoanalysis is considered.

The debates: Sexuality/gendering

Feminism and psychoanalysis share common ground in their relationship to both Enlightenment ideals and the critique of these ideals, and in their interest in the domain of sexuality (J.Mitchell, 200 1a). Lynne Segal notes that “the relations between sexed identity and gender hierarchy continually recharge the dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis” (1999, p. 176). At the end of the 19th century both feminism and psychoanalysis are concerned with the “Sex Question”. Janet Sayers succinctly captures this in her reproduction of a Punch cartoon (1986, p. 169) alongside a quotation from a tract on womanliness. In the cartoon, entitled “The Sex Question (A Study in Bond Street)”, just discernible male and female figures stand facing each other, attired in similar clothing. The quotation reads as follows:

(woman should not have the) passionate ambition, virile energy, the strong love of excitement, self-assertion, fierceness, an undisciplined temper (of men). Instead (women should cultivate in themselves) “al...

Table of contents

• WOMEN AND PSYCHOLOGY
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 CONCEPTS, VALUES AND ASSUMPTIONS
• 3 DEVELOPMENTS IN PSYCHOANALYTIC FEMINIST THEORIES OF GENDER
• 4 CLINICAL PRACTICE
• 5 THE DEPRESSIVE POSITION, THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THINKING BEYOND CATEGORIZATION
• 6 KLEIN AND PERILOUS CONNECTIONS
• 7 CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• INDEX